Believing, Doing, Becoming 02: The ABCs of Islam
Islam is a verb, not a noun. Sort of.
Welcome, New Reader (But Skip Ahead, Loyal Subscriber): What To Expect From Sunday Schooled
Welcome to the second installment of Believing, Doing, Becoming. In this high school halaqa, we explore how Islam came together through the story (sirah) of our blessed Prophet Muhammad (s). We learn about the contexts, decisions and values that shaped our faith. And then we explore what that means for us some fourteen hundred years later.
This course hopes for its two wonderful students (ages 14 and 15) to understand who our Creator wants us to become — and how to get there. Because belief without action is hardly meaningful. And action without belief is fundamentally unsustainable. Action and belief together, though? That creates character. Nobility, even, and dignity.
Action, belief, character. The ABCs of Islam.1
We aren’t people who emerged for no reason. We are a mix of the earth below and heaven above, a combination of nature and nurture endowed with free will, the ability—and the responsibility!—to transcend the lowly and aspire to the Most High. We can and must make choices. Those choices have consequences. And those consequences are our destiny.
As the friendly Imam in Disney’s Ms. Marvel tells a troubled Kamala, concerned that she’s not a decent person: “Good is not a thing you are, Kamala. Good is a thing you do.”
So please find the second installment of Believing, Doing, Becoming below. (Here’s the previous installment.) And remember: Sunday Schooled is a free resource for Muslim parents and educators and hopefully helpful to all teachers of faith. It costs nothing to subscribe and you should: For one thing, you’ll help me create a community.
None of us can do this alone anyhow.
The First Halaqa, Part I: The Shadow Cuts Through Ages and Places
We always open our halaqa with a du‘a (supplication), which one of the girls reads:
Alhamdulillahi rabbi al ‘alameen, wa’l-salatu wa’l-salamu ‘ala ashraf al-mursalin, sayyidina Muhammad.
All praise, all thanks, all gratitude, belongs to the Lord, Master, and Sustainer of all that exists, and prayers and peace upon our teacher and example, Muhammad.2
We started the first ever Believing, Doing, Becoming halaqa of 2022-23 on a beautiful Sunday morning with a simple series of questions. As you’ll see, these lay the groundwork for exploring where Islam came from in order to understand who God is asking us to be (and how we can get there.) Those questions?
It might be fun to see if you know the answers, too!
When was the blessed Prophet born?3
Where was he born?4
When did the blessed Prophet die?5
Where is he buried?6
What was the name of that city before he moved there?7
What did its name become when he moved there—and why?8
After running through this list of pretty straightforward questions, I provided the girls a map of Arabia at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him (see below). Then we talked about the particularities of Arabian society at the time of the Prophet, peace be upon him.
Wikipedia has this pretty solid map which, for reasons only God and the editors know, is in French.
The Arabs, of course, were a largely tribal people often split between small cities and Bedouin tribes. The Prophet’s native Mecca was a kind of city-state, dominated by a strongly classist, incredibly patriarchal, frequently violent culture, which disparaged women, encouraged slaveowning, lacked a strong shared ethic transcending lineage…
And yet the Arabs were not without immense virtues—courage, for example, or the beautiful arts of poetry, a strong affinity for family, and remarkable generosity, all the more impressive because they lived such difficult lives. In the harshness of the desert, Arabs showed stunning loyalty to those closest to them, their kith and kin.
That co-presented, however, with often brutal disdain and harsh disregard for those disconnected from them—there was little if any concept of a broader humanity, let alone a rich, egalitarian source of community. Much of that has to do with their faith at the time, hardly universalist in aspiration or intention.
Though most Arabs knew of Christians and Jews, and some were in fact Christians and Jews, they were mostly not monotheists. Though many Arabs recognized Allah (“God”) as the Ultimate and Formless Creator, the Being behind all, they believed Allah could only be accessed through intermediaries.
They rarely prayed directly to God. They frequently mingled God’s qualities with those of lesser forces, failing to see that everything (and everyone) goes back to God and is always utterly, completely, and totally dependent on God. Their fragmented, stratified theology reflected and reproduced a fragmented, stratified society.
Remarkably different from the world we live in today.
Pre-Islamic Arabia was a fraught, insecure, impoverished place, riven by divisions, vulnerable to social, economic and climactic stresses in ways few of us can understand today—and it is in that world, that time, and that space, emerges a Prophet who effects a veritable transformation of heart, soul, and civilization.
One whose consequences we feel fourteen centuries later.
The First Halaqa, Part II: The Shadow Cuts Through Ages and Places. But It Cuts Through People, Too.
What’s the point of talking about the past, though—unless it’s to speak about how the past shapes today and helps us think about tomorrow?
We spent a good amount of time on how differently life worked back then. On the concept of lineage, for example: It wasn’t just important to know where you came from for reasons of identity or community. It could actually save your life! In a society where right and wrong were processed not individually but tribally and collectively, a chance encounter gone wrong could end your life…
Unless someone knew who you were (assuming, of course, you were someone of consequence—assuming that harming or abusing you would cause your powerful tribe to retaliate.) Of course, some of those instincts still exist in American society today, as they do everywhere. We for example classify people and make judgments—fairly? unfairly? inevitably? awfully?—based on how people present.
Their clothes. Their cars. Their accent. Their education. Their hobbies.
We sometimes decide who are and aren’t “our people” based on snap judgments. In that context, it’s important to understand who the Prophet Muhammad (s) was.
In one respect, he was marginalized. Deprived of a father and mother.
But in other respects? His grandfather was a powerful chief. His uncle a merchant with standing. His ancestors included Abraham and Ishmael. He was not on the fringe, but descended from the very heart and soul of elite, tribal Arab culture. That mattered, as it turns out, because Arabs would slowly and then overwhelmingly become convinced that embracing Islam wasn’t abandoning who they were.9
Rather, it was fulfilling who they were meant to be. Existentially. Ancestrally. Culturally.
This part of the halaqa made for a fun and fruitful discussion and, as you’ll see, it’s one we’ll go back to again and again. Not because I want to beat on the same drum endlessly, but because I pray these lessons, questions and implications slowly sink in. I’d rather have the kids spend more time with less than too little time with too much information.
Yeah, I want them to learn about Islam. But facts? Dates? Memorization? That’s better suited to younger kids, giving them a foundation that they can then play with more creatively as the mature. I want the girls, as young high schoolers, to do more, to keep pushing their intellectual boundaries. I want them to know faith doesn’t require the suspension of intellect but in fact its cultivation and celebration.
Which is why we ended with a simple assignment.
Believing, doing, becoming. (Come to think of it, the ABCs of Islam would have been a much better title. Ugh.)
For next week, I asked the girls to identify a Muslim belief, then think of an action that follows from that belief—and then to reflect on what kind of person they should become as a result of believing as such and acting on that. So, if you believe life is a trust from God, you’ll be more likely to exercise.
And if you’re more likely to exercise, what kind of person will you be?
They’ll be asked to share their answers come next Sunday, for the third installment. I look forward to sharing that with you as well as some interviews with authors who write on spirituality and social justice, Islam in Eastern Europe, and the surprising ways refugees (including Muslim refugees!) are revitalizing American cities. That’s all to come soon, God willing.
We closed with a recitation of Surat al-Fatihah, the first chapter of the Qur’an, and broke for a dance party.
Just kidding.
Even I groaned when I wrote that.
I’ve asked them to memorize the Arabic because knowing even a little Arabic cultivates a feeling of empowerment and access (I’d love it, of course, if they learned a lot of Arabic!) Religion shouldn’t be something mysterious and distant, the property of folks who we elevate to statuses and authorities they don’t deserve (and are actually harmed by). When we allow only certain categories of people to own certain roles and responsibilities, we excuse ourselves from participating in religious life—among other things, making it impossible for us to create our own religious spaces or involve ourselves in existing ones.
Many scholars say in or around 570 CE.
He was born in the city of Mecca, in western Arabia, in the Hijaz region.
He returned to God in the year 632 CE, at the age of 63.
He is buried in what is now the blessed metropolis of Madina—literally, “city”—located several hundred miles north of Mecca. The distance between two is comparable to the distance between Cincinnati and Cleveland. See what I did there, connecting past to present? Incidentally, almost nobody who does not live in the Midwest has any idea that Ohio is that large or that these two cities are at opposite ends of the state. Also, for people outside of Ohio, the relationship between Cincinnati and Cleveland sometimes approximates the relationship between New Jersey and New York.
I will leave it to you to imagine which is which.
Also, if it was possible to put a footnote in a footnote, I would… but ever think about this? Cincinnati’s football team is the Bengals, as in the region of South Asia—why nobody has launched a South Asian fast casual restaurant in the region branded on this association I’ll never know—and Cleveland’s is the Browns, and most South Asians are, well, Browns, but I suppose employing that association might be more sensitive. But I mean you can’t really do that with the Lions or the Bears or the Colts.
Madina used to be called Yathrib.
I actually don’t know what Yathrib means. (Tell me if you do!) But when the blessed Prophet (s) moved there, escaping Meccan persecution in 622 CE after the hijra (exodus), Yathrib was renamed Madinat al-Nabi, or “City of the Prophet.” After the blessed Prophet’s passing, the city became known as “Madinah al-Munawwara,” the Radiant or Resplendent City. It’s still known as that today.
Which of course raised the obvious question—one I hope they’ll linger on for years: If we want Islam in America to grow deeper roots and reach farther, it can’t just be the property of certain communities or ancestries. It has to be seen as accessible to, meaningful for, and deeply implicated in the history and culture of all kinds of Americans. More than that, it has to be seen as connected to the past, the present—and the future.
Fortunately, as many authors have noted, some of those resonances already exist. We could do more to share and elaborate on them, though.